Media Essays: The Summer Horror: Freddy vs. Jason
- mediarocks94
- Jul 2
- 14 min read
(Out of the dark stepped out the Wandering Fox, with a ominous look on his face.)
Hello everybody. It’s that season of the year again...
(Only the curtain was then tugged back by his little cat, letting the sunshine in. The Wandering Fox sighed and threw his coat off.)
Okay, yeah, still summer, but that ties into what I’m talking about! Every summer season the movie studious crank out their big movies to take in as much cash as they can. And don’t they do their hardest to try it? The summer movies are often for the big action adventure films or the kids having their fun with animated movies from Pixar or Disney. But what if I were to tell you in the summer of 2003, New Line Cinema had finally released a movie they had been developing for so long? What if that movie was a climax of not one, but TWO franchises with the setup all there back in 1993? That movie is none other than the crossover, Freddy vs Jason!
Yeah. I am no stranger to talking of horror on the blog, and I thought this would be something to discuss as it’s this film which had began to help me understand making a film is not easy. This movie was being developed as far back as 1987 and that’s not even mentioning the hurdles they had to jump through to get here. With this blog not only a review blog but also an insight in filmmaking, I thought I’d talk about the film here both from its story and history. So, stay awake, stay alive and read through what made Freddy vs Jason such an interesting movie in film history...
Origins
Let’s go back to 1984. Friday the 13th had been going well, having released four films by now, with The Final Chapter out in cinemas and Jason Voorhees seemingly met his end by Tommy Jarvis. Only in this year, a new villain was born in the first A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, with Freddy Krueger haunting the dreams of the youngsters of Elm Street. With creative kills, a more talkative killer, and grabbing at you and leaving you fearful of falling asleep with a scary rhyme, Freddy took the movie realm in his clawed glove and birthed a new kind of horror with the supernatural. With this, New Line Cinema was well on its way to becoming a big player in the movie business. With Paramount though, they were quite happy to just move on with their plans for Friday the 13th with A New Beginning, which had Tommy Jarvis trying to recover from the trauma of everything Jason did, and with a hockey masked killer on the loose everybody was scared of Jason maybe having returned. But it was revealed Jason wasn’t the killer here. It was Roy Burns, who had gone on a killing spree out of revenge, but Tommy’s mindset was still shattered enough he was going to follow on in Jason’s footsteps. The reception to the movie was not good though, with viewers and fans annoyed the killer wasn’t Jason. Wanting to get back in the fans’ graces, Paramount then made Jason Lives, which had Tommy accidentally resurrect Jason as an undead killer. With Jason much stronger than before, this opened up more creative kills and a lasting legacy with the characters around him, Jason was back and was here to stay. Meanwhile, Freddy had another few sequels by this point which saw the Elm Street populace still trying to stop him.
Jason was back, Freddy was sticking around, but the former was struggling to make a financial success while New Line was making a lot of money. With development on Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood beginning, the studios and filmmakers then had an idea to try and make up as much money as they could: why not have Jason meet Freddy Krueger? Fans desires to see them both on screen played a part in this and so Frank Macuso Jr wanted Tom McCloughlin to try and unite the studios in bringing Freddy and Jason together. The plan however failed and thus Friday the 13th went on to make its new movie with Jason going up against telekinetic girl Tina, with Kane Hodder making his first appearance as Jason. While many liked the final half of the movie with Jason and Tina fighting, many complained it was much too similar to Friday the 13th Part 4, and with this the money didn’t do that well for the movie. So what did Paramount do next to try and save their series? Why make a movie about Jason going to New York! That was interesting. Only there was a big problem upon the movie being made: Jason spent the majority of the movie on a boat. Then he spends the last act of the movie in New York and he’s only in Times Square for a small amount. The film failed to make a profit and this had Paramount sell the rights of Friday the 13th to New Line. Friday’s co-creator, Sean S. Cunningham, tried making Freddy vs Jason but it was on hold thanks to Wes Craven returning to A Nightmare on Elm Street with A New Nightmare. With New Line owning the rights to Jason now, the question was exactly on how can they make a Good Friday the 13th film? Well, kill Jason for good. However, this was done only a couple of years after Freddy’s Dead, The Final Nightmare was released.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday had its own drama of behind the scenes stuff, with many debaters going Sean wanted a movie to be rid of the hockey mask, a young director who had little control over the movie, but the film was made and released in cinema. The movie’s quality is debated with many annoyed Jason’s past and family was retconned, Jason himself was now a body hopping monster, the movie did leave a sour taste in the mouths of those who came to see Jason be defeated. However, the film did deliver good on this: it finally set up Freddy vs Jason.
With Freddy appearing at the end, it had everybody excited. But this was not the only crossover the film set up, as it set up Freddy vs Jason vs Ash, with the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and the Kandarian Dagger, the latter of which is used to kill Jason.
The Necronomicon
Jason holding the Dagger in a photo promo for Jason Goes to Hell.
So there’s the origins of how the movie was conceived and beginning to be set up. However, by this point the slasher genre was becoming a bit tired, save for the Scream franchise being made, and with the reception to The Final Nightmare and The Final Friday being quite negative, fans would have to wait for ten years until they’d see Freddy and Jason again.
Or so they thought.
Just a year later in 1994 a new Nightmare movie was made called A New Nightmare which saw a demon taking on the form of Freddy and haunting a new Nightmare on Elm Street film set. That film didn’t do well at the box office but was met with a mixed reception from critics and audiences. But for Jason, he wasn’t seen again until 2001 with Jason X, which saw him cryogenically frozen for 400 years then wakes up on a spaceship, becomes a cyborg, and yeah.
You might be curious as to why Freddy vs Jason was not made sooner. This was because Wes Craven, creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street, was quoted as saying it was taking "something that had a lot of impact and dignity and dragging it down to another level." In an interview with Fangora. This had seen Cunningham make Jason X to keep the franchise alive. The film was the most lowest grossing Friday film and Michael De Luca stepped away from it.
So there you go.
But how did they finally get the film made?
New Line were still keen on getting the film made and throughout the decade various writers and filmmakers were met with and tried their hands at making the film, to the point even Gullimero Del Toro and Peter Jackson were offered the chance but they turned it down. The film underwent different names including Nightmare 13: Freddy meets Jason, Freddy vs Jason: Millennium Massacre.
A idea for the film would have had it revealed Freddy was Jason’s father but this was not taken in as The Final Nightmare did it with Maggie. Another idea was that Freddy worked at Crystal Lake as a camp counsellor and let Jason drown. Another had it be Pamela and Elias Voorhees lived in Springwood and Jason was a victim of Freddy’s but avoided being killed, to which Pam and Elias led the people of Springwood to kill Freddy.
Finally, the film found its creatives. Mark Swift and Damian Shannon were hired after they wrote a pitch that De Luca was happy with, David S. Goyer came in to trim the script and finally Ronny Yu was brought in as a director after he first turned it down with him given the chance to have a lot of creative freedom. With this, Robert Englund returned to play Freddy for an eighth appearance and it was prematurely revealed Kane Hodder would return as Jason with many excited to see the friendly duo in real life clash as their characters. However, this was when another big drama happened with the movie that still affects it to this day:
Kane Hodder was not going to play Jason.
This caused a big uproar in the fandom and within the studio. Cunningham thought it was a bad idea as he felt Kane was the best actor for Jason and should’ve been in the film. Kane did have a script for the film and even met with Ronny Yu and studio executives but Kane says to this day he wasn’t given a reason why he was turned away. According to Yu though he and the team wanted to reinvent Jason to make him taller and slower paced. The topic of Hodder’s height is debated to this day as though he was 6’3 to Robert’s 5’9, they went along to cast 6’5 Ken Kirzinger as Jason, with Ken having played Jason in a couple of scenes in Jason Takes Manhattan, though it’s debated as to wether the reason was actually about the height and more about how Ken was more available with him being Canadian and they filmed it in Vancouver and they didn’t want to pay for Hodder’s travel to the filming. To this day Hodder’s loss of the role in the film is still a hard subject for him to talk of, though he’s still good friends with Robert and Ken. Ken’s casting is even debated by other actors who played Jason in the film, with Douglas Tait playing Jason in the final scene.
“Unfortunately for me, it was the only scene I was hired to do. The test audiences were confused about the original ending, they thought Jason Ritter's character was becoming Jason [sic]. You can see it in the deleted scenes, that is why they decided to re-shoot the ending. Originally I was being considered for playing the role of Jason in the entire film. It was actually between me and Ken. When they took the film to Canada, I was out of luck. There was no way they were going to pay for my flight and hotel stay when Ken was a local. Also, Ken is older than me and he was a lot more established in the business than I was at the time...I was on the film for a couple days. The water sequence took a lot of preparation. They realized that when I got wet, I looked too skinny in the clothes, so they had to bulk me up with pads and extra clothing so it would look like I was still big. Being with all this extra weight, one eye covered, a machete in one hand, Freddy's head in another hand, and being totally submerged in water, made that scene very difficult. Also, Ronny Yu wanted me to walk like I was walking on land. He wanted it to look like I could walk through the water without it making me rise to the surface. To do this effect, they had a rope tied under water that I held onto with my left hand (with Freddy's severed head in it also), and I held myself down on the ground so I could pull myself and walk forward.” Interview with Douglas Tait.
This wasn’t the only drama the movie had, for Katherine Isabelle clashed with Ronny Yu who wanted her to do a nude scene when she said she had a “no nudity” clause in joining the film, a lot of actors and executives had wished they stepped in earlier to try and stop Yu with some of his creative choices on the film, and it didn’t help Jason Ritter (yes, Dipper Pines himself) wasn’t exactly doing his best in the movie, there’s some notable moments in the film in which he’s clearly not giving a toss. It doesn’t help either they had reshot the ending as the original left many unhappy with the fact after Will and Lori have escaped Freddy and Jason, they make love until Will becomes angry and then sprouts claws from his fingers with him about to kill Lori, with many asking if this meant Will was possessed, was Freddy’s son, where exactly was Jason, and why hadn’t this been hinted at before?
The film did have various different endings, some of which were decent with Pinhead from Hellraiser greeting Freddy and Jason asking what the problem was, to Lori’s father finding Freddy’s glove at Crystal Lake and being dragged to hell, to downright bizarre with a tunnel vortex opening up in Crystal Lake and draining it, to Freddy summoning Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy in fighting Jason. New Line didn’t go for the Pinhead ending as they didn’t want to buy the rights to another franchise and character just for an ending.
But still, the movie came out and it did somewhat well at the box office, making over its budget. There was plans to go on with a sequel involving Ash Williams of the Evil Dead series but Sam Raimi stopped that, so Freddy and Jason’s tenures came to an end with Freddy’s head taken by Jason, though that did end up getting made as a comic.
Freddy and Jason made a return to the cinema in remakes, then video games like Mortal Kombat, the live service Friday the 13th game, talk shows, a voice dub of Freddy vs Jason vs Ash, and finally Jason returned in MultiVersus.
While it does sound like Freddy vs Jason came and went, it cannot be understated how much work went into this movie, nor its impact. Crossover films are nothing new thanks to Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, Aliens vs Predator, but you could argue the fact Freddy and Evil Dead appeared in Jason Goes to Hell was an early example of setting up a cinematic universe that many audiences are well aware of today, with Dimension Films even trying to get in on the crossover with Hellraiser and Halloween. It even spawned fan creativity with a fan film bringing Freddy face to face with Jason, Michael, Leatherface and Pinhead, with many following on from these early fan creatives to this day.
As for the film itself, it was quite clever in how it gets the plot going and joining the universes was quite easy. Freddy has been trapped in Hell since The Final Nightmare, the people of Elm Street have suppressed and erased him from their memories to spare the next generation of kids from him. Freddy finds Jason and, disguising himself as his mother, convinces Jason to rise from Hell and kill the teenagers of Elm Street. The plan works until Jason kills a would be victim of Freddy’s and then kills a big chunk of teens at a rave. Freddy, desperate to get rid of Jason, drugs him and begins to beat him up in the Dream World, until the teens bring Jason back to Crystal Lake and bring Freddy into the real realm, where the fight is brutal. Jason throwing Freddy like a rag doll, Freddy stabbing Jason in the eyes, Jason tearing Freddy’s whole arm off, Jason being whacked in the face with building equipment, the fight was what any horror lover dreamt of with these guys fighting it out.
In fact, I want to give the film some praise in its more quieter areas. I know you guys think horror movies is all about the blood and gore. Yes, that is a big case with horror films. But it’s also about setting up the mood for it. This film does a great job at setting up not just the tone of the film but also Freddy and Jason. The movie begins with us in Freddy’s boiler room, he’s thrown a little doll into his furnace, all the while a scared little girl is trying to hide from Freddy, who’s abducted her. The music is old and chilling, with Freddy’s narration of the scene guttural and old, while his human self is there sharpening his claws. Freddy’s mindset is introduced to us straight away through this scene with him narrating all the way through.
“My children. From the very beginning. It was the children who gave me my powers. The Springwood Slasher. That’s what they called me”.
Freddy has no remorse or regret in his voice. There’s a hint of delight to his voice, coinciding with Freddy turning around to find the little girl and flexes his claws. The little girl can only crumble in sheer fright as Freddy comes closer, then the camera focuses on the doll as it’s destroyed in the fire with the girl screaming in the background. We then cut to Freddy with a scrapbook photo of his victims, licking a photo of a victim.
“My reign of terror was legendary. Dozens of children would fall by my blades”.
While Freddy’s laughing, he doesn’t know the parents of the dead children have gathered outside and then burn him alive in his boiler room. We then get a closeup of Freddy in his horrid form. The more he talks, how he proudly says after he died he became something much worse. We then get a montage of the other Nightmare movies, seeing Freddy killing many others, with him happily saying that’s when the fun really began. Only for his voice to turn nasty, angry as he reveals they’ve now found a way to forget him, leaving him trapped in Hell. Freddy then explains how he had to scavenge the boundaries of Hell, telling you he was going everywhere in Hell to try and return to haunt the Elm Street residents. Then we come to Jason.
Unlike the fiery boiler room, here we are the cold dark Camp Crystal Lake where a woman is skinny dipping. The woman realises she isn’t alone and darts through the woods until Jason finds her. The scene itself sums up a lot about Jason. You trespass on his property, you’re dead. If you’re baring yourself and desiring sexual stuff, he’s gonna kill you. This is further explained how the woman turns to other victims, all saying how they shouldn’t have been drinking, being idiots at the lake. This tells you how Jason feels about them, if they were doing their job and protecting him from the bullies then he wouldn’t have been chased to the Lake. If they weren’t having sex, drinking, doing drugs or messing about, then he wouldn’t have been driven here. Then we get Pamela. As we know it’s Freddy disguised as her, helping you see well how Freddy has researched Jason. The fact he appeared at the end of the Final Friday gives you an idea he’s been watching Jason for a long while. These scenes set up not only the tone of the movie or Freddy and Jason as characters, but it sets up how different they are.
Freddy kills out of glee, he enjoys killing others and thinks it’s fun to do it. He was killed by people who wanted revenge for killing their kids. He comes back to continue his work. He’s also got a sexual motive for young women. Jason is motivated by hatred and revenge, with his mother killed Jason lost the only person who loved him and now all he had to live with was the fact he was let down by the world. He takes no glee in killing. He hates sexually hungry teens. He doesn’t leave Crystal Lake to kill others unless he has to. Jason will only kill children if he’s desperate. Freddy recognises this about Jason. Hence he tricks him in going to Elm Street, and the first person Jason kills is in Freddy’s house, having watched him have sex with his girlfriend, Jason ends up quite angrily stabbing the guy repeatedly then crushes him in half, just telling you this is what Jason is.
The film also does well at demonstrating just how both character’s weaknesses affect the other. Jason is set on fire at a rave and he’s not bothered by it. Freddy doesn’t let the water bother him as at the climax he swims out of the lake to kill Will and Lori with only a single hand. Fire and Water are a great contrast at the climax what with Freddy and Jason surrounded by them in the climax. The film also has a good action set piece with the Dream Realm having Freddy knocking Jason around, to the Crystal Like fight with Jason going to brute force to hurt Freddy while he had to go about with trickery to try and fight Jason. In the end, you get this incredible shot of them at the climax in which you have Jason having torn Freddy’s right arm off, his fist literally dug in his stomach, Freddy with the machete glaring at Jason, it’s this epic slow scene of these horror monsters in their bloody glory having just gone for each other.
The film isn’t perfect, but as I told you, it is quite a fun film in which you see the baddies go for each other.
Thank you for reading this curious case of filmmaking everybody. Now, if you excuse me I have to go back in and find somewhere much colder to be.
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